“I was born in Florida & grew up in North Carolina as a hilbilly punk rock raver. My mom started drawing with me before I was even two years old. So I really have been drawing all my life. I started creating digitally in 1995 when I moved to San Francisco, & my skills have been building since then! In my work, I aim for a combination of humor, cuteness, beauty & a touch of real emotion.”
Being an album cover fan is probably the sole provence of aging baby boomers like me who lovingly remember the days of wondering whether to spring the extra buck for the stereo version (OK, classic illustation freaks count too). But my friend Matthew Glass’ blog also goes for the exotic, the strange, and the sexy.
It’s the year 2012, the earth has finally been consumed by media pollution - brain dead zombies fueled by fear roam the cities…. and now the news, don’t touch that dial…
Co-Creator Mat Stevens from Team Xtreme had this to say: “Myself and Rory Cooke came up with the idea as we wanted to use as much different media as possible hence the adverts on TV’s. We were originaly gonna do aliens but it came out as zombies in the end… hey its CG stuff - so its gotta be zombies, aliens or robots! (we already did robots in the first year its basicaly a mish mash of everything we love and hate, chris cunningham, aphex twin, alien, gorrillaz, crazy frog, anti media, anti capaitailsm, anti polution, anti earth? With a good round of computer game samples thrown in…. finish him—round two fight!”
Thanks to Mat Stevens, Rory Cooke, Timothy Chauncey, Patrick Anderson, James Leaning, and all of the member of Team Xtreme for presenting this wonderful film.
Check out soon Penguin UK’s new program that allows anyone at all to design a cover for one of half a dozen books included in their My Penguin series. Essentially, you buy one of the books with a blank cover, then color, paint, pencil or whatever. Then email them a jpeg and they’ll post it. Check out the gallery here.
Having finally finished the animation for my Random Cartoons “Six Monsters” short, it came time for me to create the backgrounds. I wanted to try something new, something I’d never done before. So I took my digital camera and looked down.
When you live in New York City you spend an unfortunate amount of time waiting for subways in grimy, decaying underground tunnels. (I hear the LA people laughing). But this is the perfect place to find strange textures and splotchy patterns. I took a load of closeups of these gross nooks and crannies of the transit system.
Then I took some photos of creepy dead November trees in a Brooklyn park. (Be quiet LA people).
In Photoshop I combined the trees and the subway slime and started playing around with hues, saturation, blurs, etc. Soon enough I had a moody and interesting background. It kind of reminds me of Dave McKean’s work in the “Sandman” comic.
But it was a little TOO creepy. This is a Nickelodeon cartoon, after all. So I played with the colors in Flash to make it happier and also so the characters “popped” out in front of it.
And there you have it. I’m done with the backgrounds and done with my cartoon!
If you haven’t yet seen “Madagascar”, you should check it out. It really broke ground for making computer animation seem more like 2D animation in regards to the way characters are handled. For instance, as far as I know, it’s the first CG film that successfully makes use of what is known in 2D animation as “smear frames”. You can see these a little bit in the following clip. Watch for Alex’s hands when he is being beaten up by the old lady…
The longer that computer animation is around, the more it will start to incorporate the tricks and techniques that have been in animation since the beginning. The CG films of today are getting stronger and stronger in their animation techniques, and I hope this continues.
Introducing Heckle and Jeckle — sort of. Birdbrain Week continues with “The Talking Magpies”, a 1946 Terrytoon that, technically, stars Farmer Al Falfa. A bickering couple of married birds show up early in the show, and they don’t act much like any cartoon characters we recognize. Then the old geezer starts to chase them and suddenly, two stars are born! Mr. and Mrs. Magpie mutate into two preposterously resourceful smart alecks (both with male voices) who are way too fast for our silent-movie-leftover hero. They are back to being magpie and wife for the closing gag, but the damage was already done, and Terrytoons would never be the same (thankfully.) These wise guys would soon star in their own series, snapping up the pace for the entire studio!
And a word about that Talking Magpies stuff. Heckle and Jeckle were always billed as “The Talking Magpies.” I guess there was a pre-cartoon era when you had talking magpies, the same way you had laughing hyenas and bald eagles — the adjective just came with the package. But to folks born after 1946, that formal title “Heckle and Jeckle, the Talking Magpies” was just plain weird. Any red blooded kid would ask himself why TALKING Magpies? Why not Daffy the TALKING Duck, Mickey the TALKING Mouse, or Goofy the TALKING… whatever?
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A fantastic illustration on the Martin Short “one-man” musical, “Fame Becomes Me.”
“If you liked West Side Story, Show Boat and The Miracle Worker, then you’ll love Fame Becomes Me, Martin Short’s incredibly important new Broadway extravaganza. Backed by a brilliant cast of top Broadway performers and musicians (who constantly steal focus from Mr. Short when he’s not looking), Mr. Short fills the stage with all the unforgettable characters you know and love, plus himself. In Fame Becomes Me, Martin Short brings over 20 years of comic genius to the Broadway stage - and leaves it here.”
I saw the show myself, and it was pretty inspiring, from an animator’s point of view. Rich in character and with keen comic timing, the show made me laugh non-stop. Admittedly, it’s rather silly and sophomoric.
its basicaly a mish mash of everything we love and hate, chris cunningham, aphex twin, alien, gorrillaz, crazy frog, anti media, anti capaitailsm, anti polution, anti earth? With a good round of computer game samples thrown in…. finish him—round two fight!”
